By Jess McCabe | 26 December 2007, 12:09

Hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas/day off yesterday. If you’re looking for something to read today, you could do much worse than the latest Carnival of Radical Feminists.

As usual with this particular Carnival, there’s lots of thought-provoking stuff, which for me, at least, is often difficult to really agree with. For example, allecto dissects Joss Whedon’s series Firefly and the movie Serenity. The analysis raises lots of difficult questions about the series:

Women have very little importance in the series. I counted the amount of times women talk in the episode Serenity compared to the amount of times men talk. The result was unsurprising. Men: 458 Women: 175. So throughout the first episode men talk more than two and a half times as much as women do. And women talk mainly in questions whereas men talk in statements. Basically, this means that men direct the action and are active participants whereas women are merely observers and facilitators.

But I couldn’t agree with this:

Zoe, of course, is meant to be our empowered, ass-kicking sidechick. Like all sidechicks she is objectified from the get go. Her husband, Wash, talking about how he likes to watch her bathe. Let me just say now that I have never personally known of a healthy relationship between a white man and a woman of colour.

Aside from the troubling implication that it is impossible for a white man and a woman of colour to have a healthy relationship, and that the simple act of portraying such a relationship is tantamount to signalling it is an abusive relationship, I don’t get it. Sorry if this is a bit obscure for those readers who haven’t watched the series, but Zoe and Wash’s marriage seems singularly well depicted. What this also ignores is that Zoe’s character is much more important to the show: she goes out and fights the battles, while hubby stays home. Anyway, without going into a full-scale analysis of the show, the post is still an interesting read, along with the rest of the carnival.